On a spring day in England, six teenagers venture to a neglected part of their school where there is a door to a small windowless cellar. Behind the door, the old stairs have rotted away. A boy unfurls a rope ladder and five descend into The Hole. The sixth closes the door, locks it from the outside, and walks calmly away. The plan is simple: They will spend three days locked in The Hole and emerge to become part of the greatest prank the school has ever seen. But something goes terribly wrong. No one is coming back to let them out . . . ever.

Taut and eerie, suspenseful and disturbing, The Hole is a compelling novel of physical endurance, psychological survival, and unforgettable revelations made all the more stunning by its shocking end.

“A frighteningly good plot . . . Expertly borrows the horror and tension that made William Golding’s Lord of the Flies such a success.”–Metronews

Guy Burt won the W. H. Smith Young Writers Award when he was twelve. He wrote "The Hole," his first novel, when he was eighteen, and his second novel, "Sophie," soon thereafter. Burt attended Oxford University and taught for three years at Eton. He lives in Oxford. "From the Hardcover edition.

Unrated Critic Reviews for The Hole

Kirkus Reviews

On the Nameless Campus of a Posh Public School, Alex, Liz, Geoff, Frankie, and Mike (no last names here) agree more or less as a prank to climb down a rope ladder into an unused and out-of-the-way subterranean vault for a three-day lock-in, with mysterious and rather dominating fellow student Mar...

The New York Times

Guy Burt's first novel, which became a cult favorite in England after it was published there in 1993, is about five teenagers who allow themselves to be locked in a school cellar for three days as a prank, or, as the charismatic mastermind behind this plan describes it, ''an experiment in real li...